Since I’ve been reading Thomas King’s The Truth About Stories, there has been one particular line that has stayed with me. I have literally lost sleep thinking about this. The line is on page 98 where King talks about how many stories were lost when the libraries of Tenochtitlan and Alexandria were burned. He states, “Though it doesn’t take a disaster to destroy literature. If we stopped telling the stories and reading the books, we would discover that neglect is as powerful an agent as war and fire.” I found this to be a truly profound statement because King is passing on many stories within this very book. He ends each section telling us that we have heard the stories. Now it is our turn to pass them on. As a future teacher, I feel a great sense of responsibility to pass these stories on. I know I have talked about this in other posts, but growing up, I feel like I was screwed out of learning about American Indian culture and the struggles they have been faced with simply because my teachers never spent much time on the topic. The reasoning for this may have simply been caused by time constraints or lack of relevance in the curriculum. But it is also possible that the stories were neglected and therefore never passed on to another generation.
My goal is to never neglect what I have learned this semester and to pass these stories on to future generations so they can continue to resonate with people and live on. This is what I am trying to accomplish with my final project. I have loved the poetry from Trudell and Harjo we have read this semester and I am attempting to write a week-long poetry unit geared for a junior or senior high school class. My hope is that I can actually use the lessons I create in my classroom one day so that my students can become aware of the great things being done in the American Indian community, just as I have.
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